A Comparative Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In Chinese And American Smog News

Appraisal Theory was first developed by Martin and his associates as a theory expanded from Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL).It is a framework of lexical grammar applied to investigate interpersonal meaning in SFL and it has been employed to the analysis of different genres.The theory contains three subsystems,namely,Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Attitude subsystem deals with our feelings.It contains three subcategories,namely,Affect,Judgement and Appreciation.The main reason for choosing smog news is that the serious environmental problem,especially smog problem has occurred several times in China in recent years.It has done great harm to human's health and has seriously affected our daily life.The smog problem has caused wide public concern.It is of great importance to raise people's awareness towards the serious smog problem..Few scholars in China have studied smog news from the perspective of Appraisal Theory,especially comparative analysis on Chinese and American smog news.By employing the Appraisal Theory,the study attempts to make a comparative analysis of attitudinal resources in Chinese and American smog news.The three research questions are as follows: first,what attitudinal resources are employed in Chinese and American smog news and what is the distribution of the attitudinal resources? Second,what are the similarities and differences in the employment of attitudinal resources in Chinese and American smog news? Third,what are the functions of the attitudinal resources delivered by the smog news?The current study is corpus-based and tries to present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 30 pieces of smog news,which are collected from the official websites of China Daily,The New York Times,The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.Key words such as “smog”,“air pollution”,“environmental problem”,etc were used to search for the related news.Time span of the data ranges from January 2013 to June 2015.With the assistance of UAM Corpus Tool(Version 3.1.17)the news are first annotated with the three attitudinal resources,and are put to statistic analysis.Then,the results of the three systems are presented.Finally,qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals the similarities and differences of the features and functions between the two languages.The findings of the study show that there are totally 442 and 806 attitudinal resources employed in Chinese and American smog news.In both of the two languages,Appreciation system is the most frequently used with the proportion of 41.4% and 42.56% respectively,while Affect system is the least used,with the proportion of 26.7% and 21.96% respectively.The proportion of positive attitudes in both Chinese and American news are higher than negative ones.As for the explicitness,the two languages employ far more inscribed resources than invoked ones.Three strategies of expressing implicitness are explored,namely,metaphor,counter-expectancy and the selection of ideational meanings.When it comes to the functions of the attitudinal resources,there are three main functions,namely,highlighting the severity of the environmental problem,evoking the emotional resonance and boosting confidence of the people as well as showing the determination of the government.